I am going to be upgrading both my laptop and desktop from Win 7 to Win 10 likely in a month or so, and I know to do the free upgrade you have to do an update first instead of the clean install. However, I am going to be upgrading the 500GB hard drive in my laptop and the 120GB SSD drive in my desktop that's my boot drive to 500GB SSD's in each and was wondering if any of you knew if I could upgrade on the old drives in each, swap in the new SSD's and do a clean install and be fine?

The reason I ask is because they say the Windows 10 free upgrade is for the lifetime of the machine that you upgrade on, and I wasn't sure how much hardware changes could be made before Windows 10 wouldn't do the install on it. In fact, next year I am likely going to put a new mobo, CPU and graphics card in my desktop and curious if I can reinstall Windows 10 once all those changes are made as well.

Thank you for any advice and help.

07-30-2015, 09:04 PM

a5cent

Re: Question about Windows 10 clean install

Yes, you'll be fine swapping drives like that.

Worst case you'll have to call automated MS support for reactivation, but extremely unlikely if you're only swapping drives.